Just Write

Most people think writing only takes place with pen and paper or between the brain and the keyboard. I used to think it only happened with a Waterman fountain pen, blue ink, and graph paper. And it did, occasionally, if I held my tongue just right and everything else was put away and organized and the stars were aligned just so. Like if Mercury wasn’t in retrograde or I wasn’t too happy. That was during a period of time after my first attempt at grad school when I was trying to convince myself that I wasn’t really a writer anyway (because that’s what grad school tried to do) and if I couldn’t make it work under a certain set of perfect circumstances, well, I just wasn’t any good, and I shouldn’t quit my day job. That lasted for about a decade.

Rewind to Mrs. Tesnow’s Algebra class in 8th grade, and I didn’t give a flying fiddle what I wrote on: napkins, the blank space in postcards that came in the mail if I was too busy, lazy, or in a hurry to find something else. My hand. Scads and scads of cheap notebooks, most of which I still have. I didn’t write like it was my job. I wrote like it was my life. 500,000 plus words. It didn’t matter if it made sense, sounded stupid, didn’t rhyme or rhymed too cute, the imperative was to get it out of my head and onto something that I’d probably be mortified for someone to find without context in the event of my untimely demise. Which of course I frequently considered. This is why every writer needs a writer friend, who agrees not only to pluck your chin hair if the occasion arises but to destroy all the documents that need destroying before your affairs end up in probate.

It was then I learned that characters, given half a chance, would move into your brain with a u-haul trailer full of information about their lives and loves and precise ways of being, but they would only let you in on those details piece by piece like some kind of warped show and tell. Never in chronological order. Always like an onion, peeling back layers and layers that sometimes ended up in rings and fried. They live inside my head not like a renter who abides by a contract and pays a monthly fee, but more like a squatter endearing and ingratiating themselves as the days progress to keep you from calling the city. And at some point...well, not some point. It was 2017. One of those characters stood up straight and tall and took over as the muse, demanded that her story is THE story, and absolutely nothing else I was working on mattered in the slightest. At least not now.

I had just finished the second iteration of grad school (the one that proved to me I was a writer), and threw it out into the universe that I was willing to write whatever story needed to be told. That’s when the muse showed up with a gumbo pot and dimples in her cheeks, told me in no uncertain terms that I had to learn a new language in order to understand her completely, a dying language at that. Little did I know the journey she was about to take me on, the growth she would need me to do as a person and as a writer to be able to do her story justice. She didn’t set the bar too high that first fall. She just trusted me, and then kept upping the ante, little by little increasing the standard as I approached something akin to mastery of the previous one.

The first notion she dispelled was that there would ever be a perfect circumstance in which to write. No perfect pen or paper or chair or hat. She frequently likes to talk while I’m in the shower or in the car, at the doctor’s office, waiting in line at the grocery store or if she’s feeling merciless, when I’m sound asleep. So, if I was ever going to keep up with her, I had to let go of the old ideals and remember what it was like to write on whatever, whenever, wherever. Her first novel happened in Notes and in Google Docs mostly using my thumbs or speak to text. I learned to drop into her world at a moment’s notice like a meditation. Ninety seconds? Shut everything out and write. Twenty minutes? Forget your surroundings and write. You see, she believed so strongly in the importance of her story that it became my story. She reminded me that I’m not supposed to write like it’s my job. I’m supposed to write like it’s my life.